On 7/28/09 10:04 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Mark Williamsonnode.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Case insensitivity shouldn't be a problem for any language, as long as you do it properly.
Turkish and other languages using dotless i, for example, will need a special rule - Turkish lowercase dotted i capitalizes to a capital dotted İ while lowercase undotted ı capitalizes to regular undotted I.
And so what if a wiki is multilingual and you don't know what language the page name is in? What if a Turkish wiki contains some English page names as loan words, for instance?
Indeed, good handling of case-insensitive matchings would be a big win for human usability, but it's not easy to get right in all cases.
The main problems are:
1) Conflicts when we really do consider something separate, but the case folding rules match them together
2) Language-specific case folding rules in a multilingual environment
Turkish I with/without dot and German ß not always matching to SS are the primary examples off the top of my head. Also, some languages tend to drop accent markers in capital form (eg, Spanish). What can or should we do here?
A nearer-term help would be to go ahead and implement what we talked about a billion years ago but never got around to -- a decent "did you mean X?" message to display when you go to an empty page but there's something similar nearby.
If it's at least trivial to click through from [[New york city]] to [[New York City]], that's better than having to search for it anew.
Of course we have some case-insensitive matching for near-matches on "go" searches... we could pull from that easily. [Note this is done via TitleKey for full case-insensitivity at present... and it probably doesn't handle Turkish correctly yet.]
-- brion